The poet director who gave us intimate, detailed, sometimes visionary works such as the "Before" trilogy and certainly "Boyhood" faced a big challenge in adapting Maria Semple's 2012 bestseller "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," a comic romp about an agoraphobic Seattle architect who disappears, leaving behind her workaholic Microsoft genius hubby Elgin and sensible 15-year-old daughter Bee right before their scheduled vacation to Antarctica.

Semple's novel, which I have not read, but read about, tapped many informational sources such as police reports, emails, transcripts and phone messages to show how an incredibly complex woman deals with the downside of maternity and marriage.

With multiple narrative resources at Linklater's disposal, I wondered how imaginative, how crazy "Bernadette" could be in movie form. But Linklater opted, as he said in Entertainment Weekly, to instead concentrate on the book's "emotional core" of conflicted motherhood.

So, Linklater, operating from a screenplay by Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr. and himself, surprises us not with a pure Linklaterly work, but a perfectly conventional comic journey of self-discovery.

Cate Blanchett supplies cool composure to Bernadette, a tamped-down character silently screaming to be the creative force of nature she had been 20 years earlier when people hailed her as the next Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bee spells it out in voice-over narration, a device from Semple's novel, but one unnecessary and often redundant in Linklater's movie.

"I think that what happened to my mom is that she became so focused on her family, she forgot about herself," Bee says.

Emma Nelson plays Bee with flawless confidence and comfort.

Nelson, now 15, auditioned for the role at 12, shot the film at 13, then kept her role a secret for more than a year.

Her Bee easily meshes with Blanchett and Billy Crudup as her father, whose literary extramarital shenanigans with a co-worker (Zoë Chao) have been excised here, presumably to preserve Elgin's limited likability as a self-obsessed husband incapable of empathizing with his wife's growing resentment.

"People like you must create," mentor Paul Jellinek (Laurence Fishburne) tells Bernadette, "otherwise you become a menace to society!"